[HISTORICAL NOTE: This is the blog post that led to the founding of my Very First Feminism Blog (tear drips from eye). It also led someone to call me an “Auschwitz pussy” in the comments, which TO THIS DAY is my favorite insult I have ever been called and an eternal source of joy within my heart. Auschwitz pussy. Gosh.]
I do.
I care about every boy that was ever called a fag or a pussy or a sissy for being emotional, or sensitive, or unathletic, or just not manly enough. I care about the boys who are afraid they’ll lose their manhood if they admit they like boys that way. I care a whole fuckload about the ones, gay and straight and other, who commit suicide about it.
I care about the three-year-old that just wants a doll. I care about the fourteen-year-old who just wants a pair of high heels. I care about the (straight!) college student who loves his skirts and dresses and will never be able to wear them outside the confines of hippie school.
I care that men are less likely to get to college than women, and I care that no one seems to be pissed the fuck off about it.
I care that, although their median income is still higher than women, men’s real wages have remained stationary since the 1970s while women’s have grown.
I care about male rape survivors. I care that some people think male rape can’t exist. I care that our justice system is ignoring systematic rape of prisoners, and that many people regard it just part of the punishment. I care about the twelve-year-old boy whose rape by a teacher is regarded as good luck instead of pedophilia. I care about the rape survivors who have never realized that what they went through was rape.
I care about stay-at-home dads and men who want to be stay-at-home dads. I care about men who want to do their share of the child-rearing, whether they work outside the home or not. I care that fathers are far less likely to get custody of their children in a divorce.
I care about male domestic abuse survivors. I care that many people consider abuse of men to be a joke, the stuff of sitcoms. I care that many people see male abuse survivors as weak and not real men. I care that there are no male-only abuse shelters.
I care that the most male-dominated jobs are also the most life-threatening, from lumberjacks to firefighters to soldiers. I care that formerly male-dominated blue-collar jobs have disappeared overseas, leaving many working-class men without a livelihood. I care about men who want to be elementary-school teachers and nurses, and the mockery they get, and the fact that they are far more likely to get promoted to doing administration and management because a male nurse? Whoever heard of such a thing!
I care that women can’t be drafted while men can.
I care about every man who doesn’t seek help for his mental illness because real men tough it out. I care about men who find alcoholism more manly than therapy. I care about mostly-male soldiers with PTSD that has never been treated. I care that, even though women are more likely to attempt suicide, men are more likely to succeed.
I care that men live seven years less than women. I care that unmarried men are less likely to go to the doctor for regular checkups and more likely to ignore their illnesses until they get too bad to treat.
I care about men who have been virgin-shamed. I care about men who don’t really want casual sex but have it anyway because they’re supposed to like it. I care about men who have never felt desired. I care about men who date thin women while they dream of BBW. I care about guys who pedestalize women, and guys who think they have to become jerks or remain celibate, and pick-up artists and dudebros and Nice Guys ™.
I care about how hard it is to keep guys– talented guys, guys who have a passion for singing and dancing and acting– in musical theater.
I care about men who like romance novels. I care about male Twilight fans. I think they have bad taste, but I care.
I care that no one fucking teaches male college students how to do laundry and clean their rooms and cook, as if they’re not going to have to do that ever.
I care about men who had to learn to fight or get beaten up themselves. I care about men who can’t relate except with their fists. I care about men who have repressed every emotion except for anger. I care about the bullshit that is “boys don’t cry.”
I care about the health problems athletes have– even student athletes– because they’re encouraged to play through injuries and given inadequate safety equipment. I care that football players have long-term neurological damage from multiple concussions. I care that, for too many minority and poor men, sports seems like the only way out.
I care that I could go on with this list for hours and still not be done. I care because this is not about men, this is about my father and my boyfriend and my best friends and the guys whose books I’ve stolen and the guys whose hearts I’ve broken and the guy who broke mine and the greatest English teacher the world has ever known and my Greek professor and next year’s roommates and Neil Gaiman and Gerard Way and Joey Ramone and Jim Butcher and half of the people I have ever loved or hated or feared or wanted to be.
Now it is time for the yelling.
Feminism, overall, you are doing a shitty fucking job of incorporating men. Yes, there are many feminists who are awesome about raising awareness of men’s issues; yes, there are counselors of male survivors of domestic abuse; yes, men have benefited as a side effect of feminism. But overall, do you see major feminist blogs posting about issues mostly of concern to men even half as much as they post about issues mostly of concern to women?
Uh-huh. Thought so.
I mean, have we learned nothing from when we got black people in the movement, and poor people, and queer people, and trans people, and disabled people? The side of “well, we shouldn’t help with that, it’s not our thing really” has never, ever, ever, ever turned out to be the right side! You would think we would have caught on to the trend by now!
And what’s that about “well, men should start their own anti-prison-rape and pro-stay-at-home-dads campaigns”? Yes, ideally, they would. But the men’s rights movement is a bit of a non-starter and, frankly, we are going to need people trained in analysis and activism by the single largest and most politically powerful movement about gender issues! It would be perfectly fine to have a movement mostly focused on women, if the movement focused on men even existed.
Listen, ladies and gentlemen, we are not going to solve this whole sexism thing as long as we’re only looking at half the problem. You want women to be equal to men, then you damn well have to make men equal to women.
And, no, a bunch of talking about how men need to be more feminist does not count as work on men’s rights. I agree, men need to be more feminist. But we’re not going to get them more feminist unless we show them what feminism can do for them, and that involves working on their problems in addition to being all “men can fight rape too!” Well, you know what, women can fight gender-policing too.
MRAs, no, you are not getting off the hook.
In fact, you are the single most childish excuse for a worthwhile movement it has been my misfortune to see.
First of all, sexism is not a zero-sum game. Just because sexist shit happens to men doesn’t mean sexist shit doesn’t happen to women. The shit is raining down on everyone! You’re stupid to complain “men have so much shit and women don’t have any shit at all” because, well, that’s not true, and also because it’s completely irrelevant. The point is not an equivalent distribution of shit to everyone, the point is to find out what’s throwing the shit on everybody and make it stop!
Second, women are not evil. Let me say this again in big letters for the confused people: WOMEN ARE NOT EVIL BITCHES OUT TO GET YOU. We are people, just like everyone else, and some of us are bastards and some of us are saints and most of us are just muddling through. Some feminists thought that this whole “sexism” thing was the fault of evil rapey woman-hating men back in the seventies, but as it turns out with a few shining exceptions men don’t hate women. Sometimes they have mistaken beliefs about women, and sometimes incentive structures are set up so that sexist behavior is rewarded, and sometimes a lot of other stuff that’s nobody’s fault, but very rarely is someone like “aha! I will go oppress women today!” In fact, it would be easier if it was, because we could just go shoot that guy and then the problem would be solved and candy and kittens would fall from the sky.
Sometimes it seems like your entire movement is just taking a bunch of ridiculous shit some people said in the seventies and changing the genders so instead of saying “all men are rapists” you’re saying “all women are golddigging bitch whores who cheat on you with men with big black cocks.”
Third, some things are not issues. Chicks liking the guy with the motorcycle more than the Mathlete? Not the most important social issue of our times. (Although Mathletes are damn sexy.)
Fourth, and most importantly, movements are supposed to move. Hey, wait a second, let me yell again. MOVEMENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO MOVE. I look around the men’s rights movement and you know what I see? Some two-person protests where someone pretends to be Batman, some petitions that can’t gather a thousand signatures, a few activist groups with almost no political power, some pick-up artists, some socially awkward people not dating anyone anymore and a whole lot of complaining in comments sections. Listen, you guys. Shakesville has organized letter-writing campaigns that got ads taken off TV, Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman have published books and spoken at colleges, the SlutWalks have started a damn international movement. It is totally possible! I mean, I’m a little bit of a hypocrite here because I’m a blogger who does a lot of complaining in comments sections, but I’ve also volunteered for Planned Parenthood and feminist congresscritters, and I have my congresspeople’s numbers on speed dial, and I’ve signed so many petitions I get phone calls every day with people trying to make me give them money.
You want to know why your movement isn’t going anywhere? Because you don’t have enough footsoldiers like me and too many footsoldiers who want to sit in a corner and talk about how when the apocalypse happens those women who didn’t like me in high school are totally going to be sorry.
roe said:
Awesome post – thank you Ozy.
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heelbearcub said:
Good lord this all kinds of awesome. This is the feminism I thought I was signed up for and then I wasn’t sure actually existed. Not in a “yeah, feminism should do something for me kind of way” but in a “aren’t we all in this life together” kind of way.
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Ampersand said:
I agree with most of this post. But I’m all about minor nit-picks, so….
“But overall, do you see major feminist blogs posting about issues mostly of concern to men even half as much as they post about issues mostly of concern to women?”
If major feminist blogs did that, then they’d be spending a third of their posts talking about men’s issues.
I’m not sure this would be a reasonable expectation. I think bloggers should post about whatever they feel like writing blog posts about.
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algol said:
I believe the expectation is that a non-trivial fraction of issues that deserve coverage concern both men and women. Think more like 2/3 both, 2/9 women only, 1/9 men only.
This assumption is not valid if you take a hardline “51%” interpretation of the word “mostly”, but this goes against conversational norms, in my experience.
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Ampersand said:
I agree. But if a website with a focus on Jewish issues posted about how poverty affects Jewish people, I wouldn’t say that they were wrong for having that focus, even though many, many people affected by poverty aren’t Jewish.
An issue can concern both women and men, and it can still be okay for a blogger to post about that issue by focusing on one or the other. (Focusing on all is fine too, of course.)
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algol said:
I see what you mean, and I’d agree that there should be no blog topic czar handing out assignments. On the larger issue, I agree that you might not even expect half as many if you were looking for a sign of real interest in mostly-male concerns (though it is easier to say than “17% as many…”).
But to continue the train of minor nitpicks, technically the slant can be whatever way you want as long as the issue itself has shared interest. E.g. “women’s issues with the draft” still counts even if you don’t mention men. Whether the original statement is still as powerful with this interpretation, I dunno.
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Ginkgo said:
“An issue can concern both women and men, and it can still be okay for a blogger to post about that issue by focusing on one or the other. (Focusing on all is fine too, of course.)”
There needs to be latitude, absolutely. The problem comes when someone claims to be advocating for both men’s and women’s issues and then insists that men shut up or just play a secondary role. It’s simply disingenuous. An example is this article by someone running a major men’s issues blog, or one that touts itself as a men’s issues blog,claiming to advocate for men, and saying this: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/men-we-do-want-your-help-in-the-feminist-movement-shesaid/
If you are only going to advocate for women, fine; just don’t claim to be about gender equality. And this only comes up in the first place because of tradcon attitudes about female victimhood and who deserves to be helped and protected in the first place.
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Patrick said:
I look forward to pulling this comment out like Ace Wright the next time you write “I find it significant that [so and so] never mentioned…”
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Patrick said:
Phoenix Wright, no idea what’s wrong with me. Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney. Geez. I should stick with PC references.
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Ampersand said:
I’d appreciate that. I’ve more than once caught myself beginning to write that argument – which I really do think is a terribly bad argument – then deleted the sentence before hitting the “post” button.
Probably there are also times when I’ve messed up and written it and didn’t catch it.
(There are some contexts where I think it’s fair to criticize what someone doesn’t say. But in general, “you must not care about ____ because you never blog about it” is not one of those times.)
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kalvarnsen said:
If a feminist blogger doesn’t want to discuss men’s issues, fine, her blog.
But it does somewhat undermine the idea that the best way to address issues that affect men is to engage with feminism, a position that a fair few feminist bloggers hold.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
What I wrote before in response to the question “What’s your stance in regards to Feminism prioritizing women’s interests first above men’s concerns?”
—
Depends on the type of feminism. There are roughly 2 types: feminism that purports to support women specifically (type 1), and feminism that purports to fight against gender roles in and of themselves (type 2). The former, obviously, focuses on women. The latter focuses on the broader gender roles, by which men are also affected. For type 2 feminism, the identity of the concerned party should be less important, so long and we’re being consistent. Otherwise, it’s really just type 1 feminism, and we should be upfront about that.
A common complaint from anti-feminists is that feminism is useless for men. In the case of feminism that explicitly focuses on women, this isn’t really true (deconstruction of women’s gender roles naturally enables the deconstruction of men’s, for instance), but men’s concerns are tangential, and we’re better off forming our own group to focus on us if we really want help for our own problems, while cooperating with feminists (again, the goals overlap). That’s all well and good, but the formation of our own group seems to be, to an extent, opposed. A statement to the effect of “Feminism doesn’t help men” elicits a response to the effect of “Feminism is the deconstruction of all gender roles; feminism is for everybody.” That is also all well and good… unless the feminist in question is really a type 1 feminist, who goes back to focusing almost exclusively on women.
I don’t much care which type you pick: mostly it’s just a difference of scope, anyway. But I do think you should be upfront about your focus, and not chide men who feel left out when, to a large extent, they really are. I will, however, continue to have no patience for men who feel that a lack of focus on them and their problems invalidates feminism.
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veronica d said:
I actually like the idea of loosely coupled movements with much overlap, but an understanding that the focus of women will naturally be on what women know, their own experiences, and the focus of men should be on theirs. Which is to say, we should talk to each other. Likewise, we should know where the fault lines really are, instead of pretending that some kind of perfect harmony is possible.
And surely there will be people who kinda bridge the divide. Maybe some trans people, in some ways. Maybe some others who just have a rare kind of empathy. But in the end we each have our own viewpoint.
Which is pretty fucking far from where we are now, and mostly I blame the men. Which look, I guess I can’t excuse every sort of anti-male feminism, but it seems to me the “men’s rights” movement is pretty much a train wreck of horrible, and they really are as much anti-feminist are they are pro-men. Surely they fixate on woman-hating as much as they think about helping anyone. To me it really feels like their talk on men’s issues is really a “How can we weaponize this against the terrible women who ruined our lives.”
For example, I just read that Buzzfeed article on Paul Elam’s daughter. And sure, it’s fucking Buzzfeed. But then, it’s fucking Paul Elam. What a disaster of a human being.
On the other hand, I just read this book Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. (Which, yeah, that’s a strange book for me to read. I was actually curious about what it said for men.) Anyway, I kinda like much of what he says. I think we’d be better off if more men thought that way and followed his stuff.
Not completely. As a feminist I think he gets some stuff wrong and as a woman I wouldn’t put up with it.
(If you interrupt me while I’m reading to hit on me, I’m gonna hand you your fucking balls in a sack. Sorry, but this kitty bites, and no one interrupts math-girl when she’s thinking.)
But still, these are things we can talk about and I feel like I could talk to “his sorta man” way easier than the bitter nerd-bro, chest-puffing, try-hard redpill wannabe. Just saying.
Which is again totally different for the genuinely femme guys. They walk a different path. Read Serano, obviously. But then, maybe the femme guys need their own Serano to speak with their own voice. I’ll listen.
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Ampersand said:
I’m gonna hand you your fucking balls in a sack.
No need, I already keep them in one.
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veronica d said:
Tee hee.
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InferentialDistance said:
I have a hard time taking criticisms of “it’s the men’s fault” seriously since a feminist organization at my university attempted to shut down Warren Farrel giving a talk on men’s issues by physically barricading the building and harassing anyone who tried to enter. It makes it kinda hard to get anything done when the older, more powerful, more politically entrenched faction is sabotaging you.
I mean, it’s kinda telling that your exemplar for a Men’s Rights Activists are asshole bloggers on the man-o-sphere and not, say, the dude who ran Canada’s only men’s shelter until he ran out of money and committed suicide. But I guess asshole bloggers are the kind of MRAs you actually encounter over the course of your life, so I can’t entirely fault you for that.
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Sniffnoy said:
Not completely. As a feminist I think he gets some stuff wrong and as a woman I wouldn’t put up with it.
(If you interrupt me while I’m reading to hit on me, I’m gonna hand you your fucking balls in a sack. Sorry, but this kitty bites, and no one interrupts math-girl when she’s thinking.)
If you don’t mind, let me just make explicit here the consequence: You can’t solve the problem without the feminists on board, because they’re a relevant party and if you leave out their side you’re unlikely to get the right answer. Which also means you can’t solve the problem until they’re willing to seriously consider it.
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roe said:
Here’s the thing:
Warren Farrell wrote the founding document of the modern MRM in 1993 – and has since then politely tried to draw attention to the same men’s issues which are outlined in the OP. (Seriously, watch some of the videos of Farrell’s “gender swap” experiments and stuff on youtube – he’s like the nicest guy ever) And for year, the MRM was ignored. Or, in the case of the off-shoot mythopoetic men’s movement, roundly mocked.
Elam, for all his flaws, has drawn more attention to the men’s movement in the space of a couple of years being belligerent then being nice has done in 20. Yes, it’s all negative attention, but practically every article has some caveat about some issues that the MRAs are right about.
The MRAs didn’t design the stupid incentives of clickbait internet journalism, they’re just leveraging them…
According to MRA gender theorists, the reason this works? Everyone ignores men’s pain, but fears men’s anger.
At the conference in Detroit, Farrell credited Elam with showing him the value of expressing anger.
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multiheaded said:
This Mark Manson guy (the author of Models, although I haven’t read it and do not intend to) is great great great. An all-around cool and nice and excellent person! Check out his blog!
http://markmanson.net/a-new-masculinity
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multiheaded said:
Veronica, like, I understand that you’re AMAB and that it’s kind of “allowed” to you according to some strands of thought, – but PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, nothing about men’s genitals in any derogatory context, ever – even when you want to say the most damning and inflammatory things! Nothing about men’s genitals period, actually, I’d say. It is often harmful and scary to uninvolved people.
(Ditto for AFAB people, ofc!)
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multiheaded said:
(re: “hand you your balls in a sack”)
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multiheaded said:
P.S.: I completely agree about men not hitting on women as long as they are not visibly and explicitly seeking to mingle. What the fuck, that’s an awful norm, full stop!
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anon said:
“and mostly I blame the men.”
Gasp.
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Ginkgo said:
“(If you interrupt me while I’m reading to hit on me, I’m gonna hand you your fucking balls in a sack. Sorry, but this kitty bites, and no one interrupts math-girl when she’s thinking.)”
Veronica, I hope this is just metaphorical and even if it is, it’s an example of the sexist misandry we are talking about. (And yes, men do this all the time. At bottom misandry is men on men.)
It’s on the order of clamoring for impalement for female rapists.
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MugaSofer said:
Since everyone else seems to be disagreeing: Veronica, I definitely agree with your comment.
I’m pro-men’s-rights, and it pisses me the fuck off that I need a fucking disclaimer for this not to mean “misogynist” when I say it.
Feminism-the-movement has serious problems, but “the men” (not identical with literal men, but the people who claimed to represent us) have made the very term “men’s rights” mean the opposite, being pro- traditional gender roles. I hate it.
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Ghatanathoah said:
It seems to me that there are a lot of people who claim to be Type 2, but act like Type 1.
In particular I’ve noticed many feminists have a tendency to criticize double standards that favor men, but any time someone points out a double standard that favors women they immediately come up with an elaborate rationalization for why that double standard isn’t unjust.
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jiro4 said:
This discussion would be more coherent if we were permitted to use the terms “motte” and “bailey”.
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Ginkgo said:
“A common complaint from anti-feminists is that feminism is useless for men. In the case of feminism that explicitly focuses on women, this isn’t really true (deconstruction of women’s gender roles naturally enables the deconstruction of men’s, for instance), ”
It can and it should, but that all depends on how the deconstruction of that role goes and how far. One of the main criticisms of the female empowerment aspect of feminism is that it isn’t really about empowerment – self-defense, for instance – but about indulgence – making men responsible for women’s safety. It is founded on chivalry and chivalrous assumptions, even as it denounces chivalry as sexist. Damned right it’s sexist, and there’s nothing benevolent about it if you are on the male end of it.
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Siggy said:
I think this is the one post from your archives that I actually read when it was written… apparently in 2011? There is basically no way that I agreed with it as much in 2011 as I agree with it now.
I think MRM has become more vocal in recent years, and they basically coopt or drown out any legitimate discussion of men’s issues on the internet. This is too bad, because in recent years I’ve started socializing a lot with post-college gay men, a group with some serious social issues in need of feminist-style critique. Unfortunately, since it’s all male, not much critique is happening.
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Ginkgo said:
” This is too bad, because in recent years I’ve started socializing a lot with post-college gay men, a group with some serious social issues in need of feminist-style critique. Unfortunately, since it’s all male, not much critique is happening.”
The MRM is full of gay men and I’m one of them.
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2014/10/30/feminist-gay-bashing/
Also, this is quite problematic:
Unfortunately, since it’s all male, not much critique is happening.”
it plays to the old homophobic trope that gay men are not really men.
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Siggy said:
I don’t understand your latter comment.
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Siggy said:
As to your first comment, does the MRM ever address the widespread body image issues among gay men? Or the lack of a consent culture? Those are the big issues I was thinking about, and they line up pretty well with feminist issues, except that it concerns men.
I am fully prepared to acknowledge that some feminists hate gay men, since, after all, TERFs are a thing. However, citing a talk from 1976 is not at all persuasive, and it does not reflect my more recent experience.
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Ginkgo said:
” Or the lack of a consent culture? ”
Excuse me? There is far more of a consent culture among gay men than between straight men and women. Gay men do not have license to grab on other gay men, and accuse that gay man of being misogynist or unchivalrous (or homophobic, in this case) and sic some white knighting thumbhead bystanders to regulate for him. That is however a feature of straight bar interactions, as reported by quite a number of straight men.
“However, citing a talk from 1976 is not at all persuasive,”
Except that it documents figures foundational to the movement, who formulated doctrines still authoritative in the movement.
“and it does not reflect my more recent experience.”
Does your recent experience include being told how to be a good “ally”?
“I don’t understand your latter comment.”
The formulation treats men and gay men as two separate groups. That makes it homophobic.
“As to your first comment, does the MRM ever address the widespread body image issues among gay men?”
Occasional articles posted to the men’s rights reddit do address body images among men generally, but you are tight that it is not a major area of emphasis. In any case the bear movement does more to address these issues than any kind of authoritarian lecturing from self-appointed MRA social critics would do.
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Siggy said:
Well you’re free to disagree with me on consent culture in the gay community. However, that confirms my point that the MRM does not address the issues I am concerned about, and in fact appears to oppose me.
FYI: when I said “Unfortunately, since it’s all male, not much critique is happening,” what I meant is that feminists are not much interested in the social critique of the internal issues of an all-male group. I am unable to comprehend your response to this sentence.
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veronica d said:
I think feminists provide a good structure to talk about this stuff, namely in the form of consent models and the “ask culture” versus “guess culture” stuff. But that said, I think gay men have to do this work themselves. I mean, how else does it happen? A bunch of not-gay-men storm into a gay club and admonish the men for dancing close without explicit verbal consent? That’s gonna work?
Or maybe folks show up at a leatherboy party and make sure everyone has properly done their pre-scene negotiation as recommended by feminist kinksters? Sure, I bet they’d be super welcome.
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Ginkgo said:
Siggy,
“FYI: when I said “Unfortunately, since it’s all male, not much critique is happening,” what I meant is that feminists are not much interested in the social critique of the internal issues of an all-male group”
Am I to understand that you consider critique to be critique only if a feminist does it? That’s your solution to gay men’s problems – have feminists deal with them? Completely and inherently unsatisfactory. Feminists do not own the subject of gender.
“Well you’re free to disagree with me on consent culture in the gay community. However, that confirms my point that the MRM does not address the issues I am concerned about, and in fact appears to oppose me.”
That doesn’t follow. The MRM addresses issues of consent all the time. This blog addresses them continually: http://www.cotwa.info/ And there is no basis for ghettoizing the gay community WRT consent or anything else.
I can’t tell if the rather diffuse positions MRAs hold on consent oppose yours or not. They may well do that, but I doubt it. Most MRAs accept the standard feminist definitions of consent, with some reservations,. (You can’t revoke consent in your head without communicating that to your partner, that kind of thing. – basically the legal standard.)
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Siggy said:
Ginkgo,
It may not have been clear, but I’m more on the side of victims of assault/rape, than the people worried about being wrongly accused. I think it’s pretty obvious we’re not on the same side of this issue. Now we know where we both stand, yay!
I definitely want more (male) feminists to address this issue, and not just leave it to the MRM, who will screw it up.
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Ginkgo said:
“It may not have been clear, but I’m more on the side of victims of assault/rape, than the people worried about being wrongly accused. ”
That’s toxic. You assume it’s an opposition, and it’s not. If there’s a false accusation, then by definition there’s no victim to be on the side. Assuming there is simply a lynch mob mentality, and that’s toxic. the KKK claimed to be on the side of rape victims too.
And by the way, in general when this comes up in comment threads and actual rape victims, as opposed to those who imagine themselves their advocates, denounce false rape accusation in scathing terms.
Male feminists are absolutely not equipped to address this problem. Their have stated their bias simply by adopting that label.
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osberend said:
@Ginkgo: There is some degree of opposition (or prioritization), because of the question of thresholds. But you are right that the opposition is not universal: Improving the overall quality of the test (in terms of the sensitivity at a given specificity) can help both groups.
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Nita said:
@ Ginkgo
False accusations are a violation of justice, not consent.
Also, there is often a trade-off between the rate of false negatives and false positives of a test. That’s where the tension between justice for victims of sexual assault and justice for victims of false accusations comes from.
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ninecarpals said:
To this list I would add the concerns of trans men. Despite having a history inextricably intertwined with that of cis women, feminists who complain that women haven’t been studied or respected throughout history casually dismiss trans men as background characters. Well…no shit, Sherlock: That’s what happens when you’re ignored by historians.
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Ginkgo said:
“Well…no shit, Sherlock: That’s what happens when you’re ignored by historians.”
Ignored by historians in societies that deny they even exist!
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ninecarpals said:
Bit more complex than a blanket denial of existence, but it’s true that the historical record isn’t helped by the lack of a clear distinction between passing women and trans men until the early 20th century, and its wide adoption in the late 20th century. Terminology isn’t anyone’s fault, but it does make things fuzzy.
My rage only really enters in when someone asserts that trans men have done little or nothing worthwhile because we’re not prominently discussed in LGB or T history books, particularly the latter where we’re competing for space with trans women. For most of the US’s history gay men and trans women were conflated, and lesbians and trans men were conflated. There’s been plenty of pushback on lesbians being ignored, but it never seems to occur to anyone that maybe the reason trans men don’t appear in the activist/accomplishment areas we expect is that they face the same problems lesbians (and women in general) do, not because we float off to lounge in our new male privilege.
(We do, in fact, have a rather interesting history, but that’s a separate complaint.)
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Held in Escrow said:
I think one of the most important things that the feminist movement needs to get past if it wants to incorporate men is that voluntary gender roles, be they of the masculine man or the feminine woman, are not bad. They’re a choice. The issue comes when you say “you must be tough and badass or prime and prissy.” Throwing out phrases like “toxic masculinity” and using it to imply that the traditional male role is bad is quite possibly the worst strategy you can take.
You want to be a stereotypical Harley man? Awesome! You want to be an obsessive geek? That’s great too! Build yourself along all sorts of lines and we’ll back you. Just help others find themselves rather than forcing roles onto them.
I feel that cultural tourism might help. Go hang out with some rednecks and do some hunting and fishing. Drive down 95 on some bikes. Attend a Southern Baptist Church. Go to football games and NASCAR races. Drink some moonshine and eat some fresh venison.
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Nita said:
I can’t speak for others, but when I say “gender roles”, I mean not the particular behaviours, but their constant normalization and enforcement on the basis of gender (or, worse yet, on the basis of genitals at birth).
Basically, “voluntary gender roles” is an oxymoron to me. Without the enforcement, they would be just “roles” or even clusters of individual behaviours that some people happen to enjoy.
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Sniffnoy said:
I’ll second that.
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Ginkgo said:
“I can’t speak for others, but when I say “gender roles”, I mean not the particular behaviours, but their constant normalization and enforcement on the basis of gender (or, worse yet, on the basis of genitals at birth).”
I have to agree. that’s how I use the term. I think we are very constrained by culture, even in our very freewheeling culture. Other people presuppositions are the human terrain we all live on.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
“Throwing out phrases like “toxic masculinity” and using it to imply that the traditional male role is bad is quite possibly the worst strategy you can take.”
Is that the implication? I sincerely doubt it.
There’s always push back about how “people should let men do what they want” and “we should let men be men.” To an extent that’s fine. But really shitty behaviour get’s excused as “boys being boys.” Harm done against boys gets excused because “boys are tough.”
It’s fine if you want to live up to a certain ideal of masculinity, but a) you don’t get to excuse harmful behaviour, and b) you don’t get to hold up any self destructive aspect as ideal without criticism.
There are some bad aspects of the traditional male role. I really don’t get why people (men, generally) complain about how feminists totally ignore them and their problems related to gender roles, and then complain about a phrase that is explicitly about the harmful aspects of their gender roles.
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Patrick said:
The phrase isn’t specifically about the harmful aspects, if by that you mean harmful as opposed to aspects which should be encouraged or accepted. It can’t be limited in that way, it isn’t possible.
Masculinity as popularly conceived is an ideal with a moral imperative attached. Living up to it is thought of as praiseworthy for men, and not living up to it is thought of as a failing.
That’s the part that feminists view as toxic, because it necessarily attaches negative value to men who do not want to, or cannot, perform as masculine.
But if you remove the moral halo around masculinity, what’s left has no value to those who care for it.
This is not a subject on which compromise will be possible. Detente, maybe.
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Ginkgo said:
“and then complain about a phrase that is explicitly about the harmful aspects of their gender roles.”
It isn’t that explicit, that’s the problem. It is very often teamed with expressions like “testosterone poisoning and similar man-hating tropes.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
That’s a part considered toxic. Even removing that aspect, metaphorical toxicity remains. Even if everyone masculine was so freely without pressure, certain aspects can still either be self destructive (e.g. recklessness) or destructive towards others (e.g. the model of masculinity in which men pursue women even in the face of vocal protestation). The former is fine if it isn’t coerced or pressed: people can be self destructive if they want to. The latter is bad no matter what.
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stillnotking said:
The moral halo mostly attaches to things everyone would agree are moral, doesn’t it? Standing by one’s word, providing for one’s children, protecting the weak — all traditionally “masculine” virtues that really are virtues.
Of course, that’s not to say they can’t be perverted or misapplied. Some, like “stand up for your honor”, are misapplied very often. But not all traditional masculinity is bad, and not all of it is understood in moral terms. The parts I see feminists objecting to, like “be assertive with women”, don’t really have a moral valence at all. Men don’t act assertive with women because we think it’s morally right, but because we think it’s what they want, or because it flatters our egos, etc.
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Patrick said:
Jacob Schmidt- so in short, you now acknowledge that the reason some men interpret the phrase “toxic masculinity” as not being a targeted critique of specific forms or aspects of masculinity, but rather as being more of a blanket attack on the whole concept, is because they’ve properly understood the argument?
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Ginkgo said:
“That’s a part considered toxic.”
The problem I am having with your formulation is your use of the passive voice. It hides the person doing the considering and thereby posits one broadly held meaning of the term. That simply isn’t the case. various people use the term variously. Some of them consider quite a lot else toxic, basically all of masculinity as far as I can tell.The meaning of a term is established by usage, not by pronouncement. (Unless you are TRSDOC and mandating the meanings of Army terms of art.)
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Enforced gender roles are in and of themselves toxic: not everyone will be willing and able to live up to those roles, and they will be harmed. Certain aspects of masculinity are toxic in and of themselves, by either being self destructive or destructive of others. Idealizing the former is problematic in some cases, the latter is bad no matter what.
If you consider either enforcement or destructive behaviour to be key, irreplaceable aspects of masculinity, then sure, the criticism applies to the whole of masculinity as you’ve defined it.
Were that the case, though, your construction of masculinity is far more damning than mine.
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Patrick said:
And how would you construct masculinity in a non toxic way, after having taken the position that men attaching social status to masculinity is the policing of gender roles?
Or in other words, when you tell people who feel threatened by attacks on “toxic masculinity” that you’re only going after the toxic stuff and not the rest, what is “the rest” that you mean to leave them?
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Ginkgo said:
Jacob, you are still missing my point. You are still insisting that your understanding of the term is normative.
“Enforced gender roles are in and of themselves toxic: not everyone will be willing and able to live up to those roles, and they will be harmed. ”
I have lived this.
“Certain aspects of masculinity are toxic in and of themselves, by either being self destructive or destructive of others. Idealizing the former is problematic in some cases, the latter is bad no matter what.”
Oddly none or few of the aspects of traditional masculinity I consider toxic are ever included in this criticism, which is one reason I dispute your definition of the term. I never see male disposability or chivalry or protectiveness towards women criticized as toxic, though they surely are. Chivalry must die because it kills, just ask the Scottsboro Boys. I don’t see white knighting criticized as toxic – sexist against women, maybe , in a benevolent sexism kind of way, but not as a form of toxic masculinity None of these ever seems to come up when toxic masculinity is being criticized.
Instead what is criticized as toxic masculinity is professional sports and enjoying it, or misogyny in gaming. or Nice Goys and so on and so on. masculinity is only ever toxic when it somehow, however theoretically, it harms women – which is itself a form of white knighting, and that, as I say above, is toxic masculinity.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
There’s an interesting presumption. Could be that I don’t agree with your point, rather than having missed it.
Alright, we can look at Geek Feminism’s examples:
– Men are just like that: the idea that a Real Man constantly thinks about sex.
Emasculation: the idea that there is a finite range of political attitudes a Real Man can hold.
– The idea that Real Men should be prepared to be violent, even when it is not called for. For example, a common response to women’s tales of experiencing street harassment is for a man who’s listening to say, “If I was there, I would have punched [the harasser].” This is problematic .
– The expectation that Real Men are strong, and that showing emotion is incompatible with being strong. Anger is either framed as the exception to the rule, or as not an emotion.
– Relatedly, the idea that a Real Man cannot be a victim of abuse, or that talking about it is shameful.
Those are pretty solid, and actually more male central than my own usage: my usage includes focus on the negative effects on others, not just on men.
A quick look at Salon brings up criticisms of treatments of male rape victims and criticism of the notion that men are naturally predatory. Feministing talks about howmen are mocked for prioritizing their family; about male violence, and how it isn’t inherent.
Both twitter and tumblr’s tags for toxic masculinity include regular examples of people talking about the impact on men (although on twitter the tag is heavily overrun by anti-feminists, so it’s hard to get a good idea of what feminists are talking about on there).
The mainstream usage seems pretty in line with mine.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
And I’ve just realized that I fell for a red herring.
All well and good. Accepting your criticism as fact, that doesn’t change the fact that masculinity as a whole is not what’s being criticized. Whether or not men are being ignored, dads taking their kids camping like their dads took them is not what’s under attack.
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Patrick said:
“Whether or not men are being ignored, dads taking their kids camping like their dads took them is not what’s under attack.”
Uh, but considering it both laudatory and male-coded to take their kids camping like their dads took them is, explicitly, under attack, by you, in this thread. So while “camping” may not be under attack, “camping as masculine performance” definitely is.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Sorry Ginkgo, I shouldn’t have called that a red herring. I got your point and Patrick’s point confused.
So? Dads can still take their kids camping. Men are still free to live by most any code they please, so long as they aren’t forcing it on others or hurting others, even in the dystopian scenario in which I control everything to my liking.*
I don’t get. Are you incapable of behaving in masculine ways without also hurting people or trying to normalize it? You’re even free to hold masculinity as a personal ideal. Anyone and everyone are free to be as butch and manly as they want.
This is perfectly in line with what I was responding to:
“You want to be a stereotypical Harley man? Awesome! You want to be an obsessive geek? That’s great too! Build yourself along all sorts of lines and we’ll back you. Just help others find themselves rather than forcing roles onto them.”
So where’s your complaint?
(I actually take issue with your formulation, though I’ve let it slide as I suspect the specific disagreements won’t be relevant.)
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Patrick said:
My issue is that I hate prevarication. You, and feminism, absolutely believe that all- or at least an inextricable portion- of masculinity is toxic. All I have to do to get you to admit that is ask a few questions- what part of masculinity is toxic? And you helpfully answer that it starts when masculinity is respected.
And then you start elaborating on how that involves hurting people, or “forcing” people.
And your new, amended position might not be wrong! Holding up anything as an ideal is going to hurt people who do not or cannot want to uphold that ideal, because holding up any kind of standard is always unpleasant for those who don’t wish to be judged by it. or cannot meet it. There’s a real harm there.
So you could try to make your case. You could try to argue that the harm done by men viewing masculinity as a worthy ideal to be reached towards, and to teach their sons to reach towards, has such damaging effects that it must be stripped of it’s social capital.
But that would involve actual work. You’d have to actually weigh positives and negatives, you’d have to admit that there would be winners and losers. You’d have to acknowledge that the issue of cultural groups collectively holding and transmitting ideals that include some people and exclude others is a widespread issue, built deeply into things other than gender- big things like nationhood or religion, small things like sports fandom or every social group ever including feminism- and that there is a trade-off between the apparently human need to collectively honor ways of living with the similarly human inevitability of people who do not or cannot fit into those ways of living.
You’d have to actually… engage in moral reasoning.
But why bother doing that when you can convince yourself that only the unreasonable would be less than satisfied with a “masculinity” that is stripped of its moral valence?
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Jacob Schmidt said:
I would suggest you not try to speak for you opponents. You’re spectacularly bad at it.
For instance:
“what part of masculinity is toxic? And you helpfully answer that it starts when masculinity is respected.”
This isn’t something I wrote. It isn’t even a close paraphrase. In fact, it directly contradicts this statement: “You’re even free to hold masculinity as a personal ideal.”
You also seem to be confused in the order of events. See this: “And then you start elaborating on how that involves hurting people, or “forcing” people.”
In actuality, I focused on aspects of masculinity in and of themselves, leaving the matter of enforcement aside until brought it up, and I began with the issue of hurting people: “There’s always push back about how “people should let men do what they want” and “we should let men be men.” To an extent that’s fine. But really shitty behaviour get’s excused as “boys being boys.” Harm done against boys gets excused because “boys are tough.””
But more to the point, I wrote this earlier:
I’ve rather explicitly disavowed the notion that toxicity and masculinity are inextricable.
This simply doesn’t make sense. Removing what I’ve defined as toxic from masculinity does not remove any moral qualities other aspects of masculinity might have. If you see value in providing your family, having the option to take on another role does not remove that value. If you see value in bonding with your kids over sports, being sure to be supportive should they chose a different does not remove that value.
If stripping away toxicity strips away what you find valuable, then what you find valuable is the toxicity.
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Patrick said:
I wrote,
“Masculinity as popularly conceived is an ideal with a moral imperative attached. Living up to it is thought of as praiseworthy for men, and not living up to it is thought of as a failing.”
You wrote,
“That’s a part considered toxic.”
You also elaborated on that, at length, calling it “policing”. You’re probably right about that. And it has some harmful elements. Any boy who’s felt gender-valent shame for crying in school knows that.
Your efforts at defending your position are fairly solid demonstrations of it’s emptiness. Quote,
“This simply doesn’t make sense. Removing what I’ve defined as toxic from masculinity does not remove any moral qualities other aspects of masculinity might have. If you see value in providing your family, having the option to take on another role does not remove that value. If you see value in bonding with your kids over sports, being sure to be supportive should they chose a different does not remove that value.”
That paragraph is deeply confused “Seeing value in providing [for] your family” isn’t masculinity. Leaving that for people isn’t leaving masculinity intact in a non-toxic form.
“Masculinity” is when you start with “it is valuable to provide for your family,” and connect it to “that value is an expression of normative male-ness.” Without the aspects that you don’t want, those being the normativity and the gender association, it isn’t “masculinity.” Your conception of non-toxic masculinity even strips out the masculus.
Admit that you want to take something from people. People are invested in a moral structure that gives them a measure of pride and meaning, and that you want to dismantle. Then make the case for why they should give it up. Don’t pretend that there’s no cost. Those who will suffer the cost are not that gullible.
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veronica d said:
Myself, I’m not sure I could precisely draw the boundaries around what parts of masculinity are toxic and what parts are not. For example, a dad taking his kids camping. That seems fine.
Well, probably. I mean, we can sketch out scenarios where it is toxic as fuck. The kid doesn’t want to camp; he wants to stay home to practice violin. Dad thinks violin is faggy, and the kid needs to “man up.”
That sounds pretty toxic to me.
Of course, that is probably not what people are talking about when they mention dads and camping. Instead, they are probably thinking about really cool, healthy family time, with dad and son fishing and having a good time. Maybe dad shows kid how to tie flies or something. (Or whatever. I’ve actually never been camping and know fuckall about fishing.)
But the point is, demanding simple definitions disrespects the complexity of the topic.
####
I have to say, the idea that *being moral* is an aspect of masculinity is preposterous. I mean, what? If I act honorably, or if I am forthright, someone should say, “Oh look, veronica is acting masculine!”
That’s not even silly.
{Insert here a section about Julia Serano and “oppositional sexism.”}
####
I saw someone mention “white knighting” as an example of bad masculinity. But it’s more complicated than that. I’ve definitely seen men act that way, in the bad sense, where they puff out their chest and barge into a situation where they are not wanted and are not helping. Sure.
And yeah there is probably some aspect of this that comes from their masculinity, but really it is *boorishness*.
Is masculinity boorish?
(Actually I think, yeah, there is a way that boorishness is gendered. Men (some men) intrude, insert, get large, in ways that (typically) women do not. But let’s discuss *that* some other time.)
Back to white knighting. I’ve seen other examples, where a woman is getting shit from a terrible guy — you know, persistent guy, the one who can’t take a hint and gets rotten about it. He’s a menace.
(One “persistent guy” ended up pulling a knife on my g/f and her roommate last week. They turned him down. He got shity, got in their faces, threw a punch, and then got wrecked by two women — cuz some kitties got bite. So he pulled a knife.)
(Oh yeah, that’s toxic masculinity — we all agree, yes?)
Anyway, in real life it can be hard for a woman to disengage from persistent guy, so if another man, big and strong, steps in and helps, and then asks for no reward but a thanks — then yay! Go Mr. White Knight!
Women can do that also. But persistent guy is usually sexist as heck, and he seldom respects women, and a strong man will intimidate him and get him to back off where a strong woman will piss him off TO THE POINT OF FUCKING MURDER HAVE NO DOUBT!
So yeah, we should get rid of the *need* for white knighting.
(It’s funny that this is one of the few aspects of masculinity that MRA types don’t like. You know, the one that can help women in real distress. Funny that.)
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osberend said:
@veronica: I have to say, the idea that *being moral* is an aspect of masculinity is preposterous. I mean, what? If I act honorably, or if I am forthright, someone should say, “Oh look, veronica is acting masculine!”
That’s not even silly.
Actually, there are some threads within the classical philosophical tradition (Aristotle? maybe? it’s been a while) that make that a perfectly reasonable statement, the basic perspective being that manliness* is a virtue in everyone, and that everyone should have as much of it as their sex permits, with women unfortunately (or fortunately, since this allows for reproduction—look, I’m not saying it’s a perfect framework) being less capable of manliness than men, but still obliged to have as much of it as they can.
*ἀνδρεία, which is generally glossed as “courage,” but the meaning is somewhat broader, and the context makes the etymology obviously relevant.
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veronica d said:
@osberend — Well, then so much the worse for Aristotle.
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Patrick said:
Veronica- you have no idea. Google “Aristotle semen.” Trust me on this, this needs to be in your browser history.
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jossedley said:
Veronica – I’m thinking this out as I type, so I apologize if it’s incoherent or dumb.
I think in practice, there are some components of some people’s “masculine ideal” that are non-exculsionary, in that they’re things that you can also do without being perceived as masculine, and might be part of that same person’s “feminine ideal.”
So if somebody says “part of being an ideal man is keeping your word,” they don’t mean that an ideal woman doesn’t also keep her word.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I guess if people are going to have an aspirational masculine identity, it would be better that it include virtues, but it’s exclusionary in effect if we say “these virtues (sensitivity, honesty, martial bravery, valor, whatever) are particularly associated with these groups more than those.”
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veronica d said:
@jossedley — I guess I see it this way. If an individual man, faced with a particular moral crisis, uses his masculine identity to do the right thing, we should all celebrate the fact the right thing got done. So if I guy says, “As a man I have to own my mistake” or “As a man I have to stand by my kids” or whatever, they yay. The mistakes got owned. The kids got supported. This is good.
But on a forum such as this, I want to deconstruct these ideas, cuz they rest on sexist foundations. Which is to say, oppositional sexism exists, and their is a temptation to say, “To be forthright is manly, and thus women are duplicitous.”
It’s silly, but that sorta thing shows up enough that we should suspect their are social forces shaping these ideas. Much has been written about this. (Serano is my source for these ideas.)
I’m not a gender abolitionist. I’m fine with their being *types of masculinity* and *types of femininity*, but these need not be totalizing. One’s *being a man* or *being a woman* can exist as part of *being a person*. Furthermore, we should be suspicious about tying ideas of courage and honesty too closely with the male models, as we should want them just as much in the female models. And thus they perhaps belong in the *being a person* models, which we all share.
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stillnotking said:
The crux of the disagreement is what “voluntary” means. If a man enjoys football, beer, and backyard grilling, is it because he “really” enjoys them sui generis, or because he’s been brainwashed by cultural messages telling him he’s supposed to enjoy them? Most contemporary feminists and gender theorists endorse the latter position — if they didn’t, they wouldn’t care so deeply about beer ads and magazine covers. The very concept of “toxic masculinity” embodies this attitude.
False consciousness theory has to die. I will never be on board with a movement that tells me my preferences are inauthentic, no matter how solicitous it is of my problems. Feminism as institutionalized mommy-ism is committing slow political suicide for exactly this reason. The MRA movement is a nonstarter because it’s nothing but an attempt to replace mommy with daddy. Adults don’t want mommies and daddies, we want friends and allies who respect our point of view.
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Karmakin said:
Just to add on to this, people need to realize when they start questioning what is “voluntary” and what is not, how it comes across is that they’re making value judgements about what they’re questioning. Which doesn’t come across well at all.
I’m a guy, don’t drink beer (hate alcohol) love backyard grilling (yum!) and couldn’t care less about sports (except LCS…CLG has a really good team this year don’t they?)…but I’m also stereotypically masculine in a lot of other ways. I get overly focused on technical/systematic solutions, for example, but I’m also non-aggressive and prefer cooperation over competition, generally speaking.
The problem I have with this whole mess, is that it feels like a lot of people on both sides want to replace the current set of gender roles with a new set of gender roles that would end up being just as stifling. Instead of being pressured to drink beer, love backyard grilling and enjoy sports, I don’t want pressure either to drink wine, love fine dining and love say ballet. None of those things are me either. (I’m more of a smoothie, food truck and fringe theater guy.)
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Ginkgo said:
“False consciousness theory has to die. ”
False consciousness theory is inherently objectifying. It is a denial of subjectivity, often with some fungibility thrown in, and often a bit of instrumentalization on the side.
Martha Nussbaum nails it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectification
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Patrick said:
Well, false consciousness as you’re using the term is actually a thing tho. I mean, yeah, it’s insulting to be told that you were just brainwashed into liking something by cultural messaging and you don’t really like it authentically. But we can actually do that tho. That is an actual thing you can actually do to people. And it’s not just advertising or other “evil” things that do it.
A few comments up I’m arguing with someone who believes that it’s immoral for a father to teach his son that camping with your dad is a masculine rite of passage. Well, if that bit of parenting works, that son is going to enjoy camping, take pride in it, and consider it to be part of the set of “stuff a father/son pair ought to do.” And a generation later, when he has a son, he’s going to want to take his son camping too. That’s a trained behavior- culture, acting through his father, taught that behavior.
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osberend said:
The issue here seems to be the notion that a belief that is held as a result of inculcation is somehoe inauthentic. Because yeah, his desire to take his son camping is going to be trained, and yeah, it’s going to be real. There is no contradiction here, just in the minds of assholes who “oppose false consciousness.”
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Patrick said:
No contradiction? We are a species where we can manipulate someone into more highly valuing fraternity membership by extensively humiliating him. Or darker, we can manipulate someone into valuing having their feet mangled by mangling their feet. Or darker still, we can manipulate someone into feeling greater loyalty to his military by manipulating him into shooting a child on behalf of his military.
We’re kinda screwed up. We can manipulate ourselves into valuing LOADS of things that, from a more distanced perspective, probably aren’t in our *real* interests. There’s SOME contradiction. I mean, I get what you’re saying, but a categorical rule here is going to cause some problems.
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osberend said:
@Patrick: I’m still not seeing the contradiction between “I was manipulated/socialized into wanting this” and “this is what I authentically want,” unless you’re operating from a strongly essentialist paradigm in which every human is born with a set of Authentic Desires and only desires that are within that set will ever be Authentic.
Of course you can manipulate people into wanting things that are bad for them. People also “naturally” want things that are bad for them (e.g. excessive quantities of high-reward foods). In both cases, they still want it.
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fjvfjfh said:
The point is that if we had no influence from society whatsoever, we were unable to use language and probably dead; there is no Authentic Self to return ro, or to guilt people into becoming “again”. All pleasures are real, and we should judge them based on their effects, not where they come from.
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Patrick said:
Osberend- sure, trained affinity for things that hurt you is just as “authentic” as any other affinity in that subjective attachment to that affinity can be just as strong as any other. I guess you can have that. But it doesn’t DO anything for you to have that. The false consciousness critique, modified microscopically, still stands.
That’s the rough thing about preferences. You can train people to welcome abuse. That doesn’t mean that being abused makes them happy, or that, taking their lives as a whole, it is in their interest to be abused. The questions we deal with can never just be “how can we bring about a world that best satisfies the preferences people express,” because there’s interplay between the world we have and the preferences we hold. That’s why the false consciousness critique has legs- it acknowledges that preferences can be socially constructed, and tries to take that into account.
TLDR- you may subjectively feel the same about your desire for comfortable shoes and your desire for designer shoes. But the fact that your preference for comfort stems from your physical body while your preference for designer shoes stems from socially constructed status games is a thing that matters. Change the status game, and even if your psyche doesn’t adapt (see, eg, middle aged people rocking haircuts that were status-garnering when they were teens), the next generations will. This is a morally relevant thing.
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stillnotking said:
@Patrick: So the question is: Who are you to define which preferences are authentic and which aren’t? If I flipped things around and claimed that exposure to feminist culture has warped your mind, what grounds would you have to tell me I’m wrong? More to the point, would you receive such a claim as constructive criticism, or as a deeply intrusive and personal attack?
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Patrick said:
I don’t see why those questions matter.
To start with the easiest- obviously people socialized into liking things that are harming them will be defensive if you tell them what you think they’re doing. Whether it’s 1985 and your telling a teenage boy that mullets are just a fad, or it’s 2015 and you’re telling a conservative woman that staying with an abusive husband for 40 years wasn’t actually a moral achievement, no one will react well.
But that doesn’t mean these things aren’t true.
As for the whole “who am I to say these things” part? I dunno, just some guy who’s right about stuff? I’m not going to go up to Seahawks fans and be like, “You think you like the Seahawks because they’re a great team, but actually you’ve just been socialized to wrap your personal identity around the masculine symbolism popular among your peers. If you lived in a different place it would be a different team, or sport, or something else entirely.” That would be rude. It’s true though. So we probably need some space for acknowledging things like that, even if that space isn’t a Super Bowl party in someone else’s living room.
I nominate the internet as a good place for those discussions.
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osberend said:
Training people to welcome abuse more or less by definitions means that being abused is a source of utility for them. It is, in general, a much greater source of disutility, but so are a lot of things that aren’t a product of social conditioning.
To put it another way: Your conservative woman is deriving (moral) satisfaction from staying with her abusive husband, but a reasonable analysis indicates that that satisfaction is not worth what it’s costing her to get it. An overweight man who eats junk food all the time is deriving (physical) satisfaction from eating an unhealthy quantity of French fries, but a reasonable analysis indicates that that satisfaction is not worth what it’s costing him to get it. In what way is labeling the former unhealthy desire “false consciousness” and the latter “authentic, though unfortunate” useful?
Your football example is a beautiful example of all the problems with “false consciousness rhetoric.
1. Tribal identification, identification with tribal champions, and sport as symbolic warfare are all deeply embedded in human social psychology. So the guy’s liking-of-a-sports-team is most likely perfectly authentic. The most that’s left for “false consciousness” to explain is why he likes that sports team. But the way you present it seems to suggest (I am not saying that you actually believe this; this is a problem with false consciousness rhetoric, not necessarily with you) that the whole thing is just some sort of brainwashing.
2. Given that sports fandom is largely a manifestation of tribalism anyway, how is picking a team to follow based around the choices of your peers not an authentic manifestation of human nature?
3. You might be wrong anyway; the Seahawks clearly are a great team, judging by their performance, and it would be very surprising if no one followed them for that reason, especially given the (authentic!) human love of being on the winning side.
4. Even if you’re right, so what? Do you want to change his fandom? If not, then what earthly relevance could its provenance have to you? If so, then why? Unless the answer is a hatred of trained desires as such*, what does the fact that this desire is trained have to do with it? What arguments does it enable you to make that you cannot make with your actual motivations alone?
*Which is not impossible; Ted Kaczynski expressed such a hatred in his Manifesto. But I doubt that’s your actual position.
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Patrick said:
I’m not seeing how anything you’ve written responds to me. The point is that, in addition to the questions your policing efforts are trying to restrict people to asking, it is also valid to ask whether someone might derive more utility in a counter factual world where they were not trained to derive utility from the thing in question.
There are some *things* for which that question makes a great deal of sense. Patriotism, sports fandom, culturally specific practices that hold cultural cachet, improvisational jazz, etc. There are other *things* for which it makes little or even no sense. Carbohydrates, being well rested, opiates, music generally.
You can police language as hard as you want, but you’re not going to make that question meaningless because that question is at the core of other important questions like “What values should we hold?”
“What arguments does it enable you to make that you cannot make with your actual motivations alone?”
Every important question about social change, ever, in the history of Earth, has involved at some point the weighing the utility gained from honoring people’s present values, and what could be gained in a hypothetical world where people have adopted the values those advocating social change want to move towards.
Here’s an easy one.
“I value X. To what extent should I encourage my child to value X as well?”
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transientpetersen said:
Reblogged this on Transience.
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stargirlprincess said:
“First of all, sexism is not a zero-sum game. Just because sexist shit happens to women doesn’t mean sexist shit doesn’t happen to men. The shit is raining down on everyone! You’re stupid to complain “women have so much shit and men don’t have any shit at all” because, well, that’s not true, and also because it’s completely irrelevant. The point is not an equivalent distribution of shit to everyone, the point is to find out what’s throwing the shit on everybody and make it stop!”
I think its a serious exageration to claim feminists say men “don’t have any shit at all.” But the rest of the quote is a pretty good summary of my issues with feminism. And all I had to do was swap: men women and us them.
I hope I am just mindkilled (so it would be possible for me to recover) but isn’t the standard feminist position that sexism against men doesn’t even exist?
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stargirlprincess said:
Just to note my criticism of the redpill types is much stronger. Read the side-bar on their subreddit. The sexism is absurd. As the MRM I like Warren Farrell alot. On the other hand the current MRM leadership is really horrible. Fuck Paul Elam. Even worse the MRAs invited Stephan Molyneux as a major speaker at their conference. I do not really get why people hate Christina Hoff Summers so much (Though her book “One nation under therapy” is really scary and authoritarian I never hear about that book when people criticize her).
Also I don’t have any issues with Ozy-style feminism.
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Ginkgo said:
“Just to note my criticism of the redpill types is much stronger.”
They are utterly toxic. They are the men’s rights equivalent of TERFs.
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ozymandias said:
Yes, I feel like the average Men’s Rightser is someone who broadly shares my values but with whom I have (important!) empirical differences. The average redpiller… eeeugh.
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Ginkgo said:
“False accusations are a violation of justice, not consent.”
I really like this. Wow, I have never seen that distinction made and it is important.
The two things are related of course; the justice issue in FRAs turns of the issue of consent, but that menas they are distinct.
“Also, there is often a trade-off between the rate of false negatives and false positives of a test. That’s where the tension between justice for victims of sexual assault and justice for victims of false accusations comes from.”
This captures it well.
The whole matter if fraught. There are outright FRAs – knowingly false accusations of rape, knowingly false identifications of perps. They are not rare because for one thing, they are incentivized by a whole range of legal and cultural factors. Thank god most people are decent and honest, or there would be more.
But there are also simple erroneous accusations where the accuser is not at fault for anything. If anything these are often a second victimization. Prosecutors have to make numbers and the bad ones don’t care how. So they browbeat rape victims into hasty identifications, to load guilt for helping falsely imprison someone, onto the rest of the shit they are dealing with
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ninecarpals said:
@Ginkgo
Oh my god, bless you for that last paragraph about unintentional accusations. Eyewitness accounts are shit, and lineup procedures aren’t standardized. No one wants to talk about this because it’s not a political football – it seems obvious that everyone should agree that it’s bad, does happen, and isn’t the fault of the victim or the accused…and it’s that last part that makes it unappealing.
Re: incentive structures, it’s not a simple as one side wins at the expense of the other, because there are really three groups with three different sets of incentives. The psychology of a false accusation is distinct from a real one, because there is no trauma involved. “Why would they put themselves through a process that’s brutal for them?” simply doesn’t apply, because the process isn’t brutal in the same way it would be for a victim: You’re recounting a rape that never happened.
Paying attention to what incentivizes false accusations in particular is important.
It’s similar to all the arguments about how DV resources geared toward men will subtract a proportionate amount from those intended for women, which doesn’t make any sense when you think about what those resources are. Making informational brochures gender-neutral, for example, is not a zero-sum game at all; changing a few words around takes minimal resources. There’s also disparate impacts of different resource levels: If it costs, say, $3,000 to open a shelter, and you have $10,000, then sparing $3,000 for them men will do exponentially more than $2,999. (Numbers ludicrously low for readability.)
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Karmakin said:
I don’t know if it’s a “standard” feminist position, but it’s certainly becoming more common. More and more people, unfortunately are adopting ideologies based around hegemonic conflict being the core root of gender bias. This is coming from both sides, by the way. (It’s actually a fairly automatic response to someone claiming hegemony in one way to claim hegemony in the opposite direction..not that this makes it right)
So instead of a model where we all have these subconscious biases, we have a model that pits men as a class vs. women as a class. Which is where I think that idea comes from. I think that model, the latter one, not only is unsuitable to fix the problems facing men, I think it’s entirely unsuitable to fix the problems facing women.
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ResearchToBeDone said:
For a lot of people it is, but for most of those people (at least in my experience), they’re not saying that prejudice against men doesn’t exist, they’re saying that sexism defined as a society-wide structural imbalance of power against men is impossible because the balance of power leans toward them. It doesn’t mean nobody is biased against them, it means the system as a whole, on balance, allots them more power.
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InferentialDistance said:
Scott Alexander accurately captures my feelings on the semantic deception going on there:
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ozymandias said:
Incarceration imbalances obviously disproportionately affect men, and are obviously structural and society-wide.
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ResearchToBeDone said:
@Ozy That makes sense. So I’m curious, and I’m not intending this as a “gotcha” thing, I’m trying to sort it all out in my head, and I think hearing these distinctions made would help.
In your racism post, I got the impression the definition I referred to is the one you used with things like this from bits like this:
“anti-racists are usually working under the Racism-2B definition…Anti-racist: No, it’s not, you can only be racist against people of color…I tend to use the Racism-2B definition myself”
and:
“Which is why I call discrimination against white people “prejudice” and discrimination against people of color “racism.””
Is the difference here simply that there literally are no axes across which white people are disadvantaged and there are a few of those opposite-facing axes for men? I’m not saying I don’t believe that, I’m just trying to understand if that’s where you draw the distinction or if it’s something I’m not seeing?
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ozymandias said:
Yeah, it seems to me that there are quite a few circumstances where men are disadvantaged structurally but basically none in which white people are disadvantaged structurally.
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Ginkgo said:
“they’re not saying that prejudice against men doesn’t exist, they’re saying that sexism defined as a society-wide structural imbalance of power against men is impossible because the balance of power leans toward them. ”
By doing this they objectify men. “Fungibility” – lumping all men into one borg – is a form of objectification. It denies the facts of how power actually works. The fact is that the balance of power leans towards kyriarchs, male and female. That’s for instance how women got the vote. The suffrage movement was all elite women. Mother Jones called this out. Well, whatever works. It was good for everyone.
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jiro4 said:
Ozy: Do the Duke rape accusations not count as an occasion of white people being disadvantaged? (Because they were also male?) It’s pretty obvious that they wouldn’t have been attacked if they were black, and that there are wide-scale societal factors that led to that.
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Patrick said:
Jiro- wait, why is that obvious? What was the racial angle? Sure, the “white frat boys are rapists” thing is out there, but young black men aren’t exactly free from similar stereotypes. What are you referencing?
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Jiro said:
Patrick: You basically answered the question. “White frat boys are rapists” requires that the accused rapists be white.
It is, of course, true that there is also a stereotype of blacks being rapists. That proves that white people are disadvantaged structurally in one segment of society and black people in another. I don’t think “disadvantaged structurally” requires being disadvantaged everywhere (and if it did, even black people being thought of as rapists wouldn’t count).
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@voidfraction said:
Great post. If you ever want to feel complete despair at the state of feminism, ask a feminist if the 10-to-1 male/female incarceration disparity counts as sexist discrimination, and watch as he or she jumps through rhetorical hoops to avoid giving a straight answer.
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Bugmaster said:
Isn’t sexism currently defined as “something that cannot happen to men”, basically ? If so, then the question should read, “do you believe that the 10/1 incarceration disparity reflects an unwarranted prejudice based on gender”, or something to that extent.
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empress cupcake said:
I want to defend the hoops a little bit. Not to argue against incarceration rates as sexist discrimination against men, but because I think there are justified reasons why a honest person who is sympathetic to men’s issues might not perceive it that way.
To me it feels like classism and racism for example play, or at least have historically played, a lot more important role in causing the disparity. The criminal system is (more or less necessarily) cruel and inhumane, and it happens to treat women closer to the way all humans ought to be treated because of benevolent sexism toward women. Man was the default human. The correct way to deal with women criminals was advised by how their role and status as women deviated from that of men. The correct way to deal with men criminals was advised by how their role and status deviated from that of high status men.
There are barriers to the humane, just, evidence-based treatment of criminals and prisoners that go beyond sexism against men. It is generally agreed that some people are a threat to order and security and need to be locked up. We’re living in an era of increasing economic inequality. What’s to say that if the treatment of the genders in the criminal justice system is reexamined purely from a paradigm of sexism, it won’t lead to equal injustice for women instead of better justice for men? You would need to bring in additional assumptions to rule out this solution as unacceptable.
Acknowledging that men are being discriminated against in this context, focusing on the other issues common to many prisoners, most of all economic inequality, still feels more direct and honest to me. Feminism and increased economic equality have had the effect of shifting emphasis from the perception of lower classes as violent, incorrigible and disposable to men as violent and incorrigible. I can’t really appeal to any evidence, but to me it seems as if the former is still the prejudice that has broader societal implications.
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Anon said:
“Fourth, and most importantly, movements are supposed to move.”
This is a mostly invalid criticism. It effectively states that if your issue isn’t being addressed, your issue isn’t worth addressing or your movement isn’t worth supporting. Its application effectively blocks out any new movement from gaining steam.
Now, you can criticize an organization at the head of a movement for this, as that organization is likely supported by the movement and entrusted by said movement with accomplishing things. However, this criticism is really only valid from a position supporting a movement.
What the MRM needs to be criticized for is its willingness to mirror the less savory tactics of its opponents under the tit-for-tat policy. In doing so, they establish a pendulum effect within society. A pendulum spends far less time at the bottom of the arc than it does at the two extrema.
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Ginkgo said:
“MRAs, no, you are not getting off the hook.
In fact, you are the single most childish excuse for a worthwhile movement it has been my misfortune to see.
First of all, sexism is not a zero-sum game. Just because sexist shit happens to men doesn’t mean sexist shit doesn’t happen to women.”
Ozy, this sounds like you are erasing MRA women, who make up a big and very loud part of the movement. When Typhonblue talks about male hyperagency and female hypoagency and calls it the basis of the gender system, she is talking about sexism against women just as much as against men. It’s all sexist. In fact when it comes to sexism, a lot of women are MRAs because of the misogyny they saw in feminist positions.
You may have this misapprehension because this post is old and it may have been what you saw at the time.
“Fourth, and most importantly, movements are supposed to move. Hey, wait a second, let me yell again. MOVEMENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO MOVE. I look around the men’s rights movement and you know what I see? Some two-person protests where someone pretends to be Batman,”
Ozy, again, this is an old post and times have moved on. In the meantime Elam and his crew have gone after a prosecutor in main who persecuted a divorced father and may well get her disciplined or even disbarred. In Washington State a women MRA is taking the issue of paternity fraud to the legislature:
http://ncfm.org/2015/02/news/discrimination-news/against-men-news/ncfm-member-naomi-evans-update-on-paternity-fraud-reform-legislation-in-washington/
On the circumcision front, intactivists are raising huge waves, at the highest levels. You may not call them MRAs, but circumcision is definitely a men’s rights issue.
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Bugmaster said:
Hmm, I feel weird saying this as a man, but I am actually all in favor of feminism being a movement with a tight focus on women’s issues. This way, they can actually get stuff done. Similarly, I see nothing wrong with creating separate movements for gay people, atheists, men, vi users, or whatever.
Obviously, some of those movements are going to overlap with others; for example, there exist lots of gay atheist male vi users. But that doesn’t mean that your local vi user’s group should focus on gay issues, or that the agenda for your church/state separation rally should be written exclusively in vi.
Keeping a tight focus on a small set of core issues allows the movement to mobilize its limited power much more effectively. I see this as a good thing. However, bad things happen when your movement switches focus from “let’s promote vi and make sure that vi users are never stigmatized” to “emacs is evil so let’s all work together to hurt emacs users as much as we can”. Promoting your favorite issue is not necessarily the same thing as stopping other people from promoting theirs.
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qwertyne said:
one of these things is not like the others: while niceness, lack of opressive gender norms, belief in the rapeability of, and such are not a zero-sum game, when you talk about their income, you have two options:
1. suppose that changing the economic system so there are more money in general paid in wages to distribute between men and women who are employed is feminism’s job – I am a leftie and I’d like to see it, but it is not a feminist problem! if it was, we could just throw everything in the pot, AIs, enviroment, medicine, agriculture, with no limits! What if an asteroid comes and wipes out men (and women and the rest)? feminism to the rescue! So we are left with
2. – the one where we suppose the sum total of wages to be unchangeable, and we only have power over the way it is distributed between men and women. And if, as you say, women are still worse paid for the same work, then it is not mean or egoistic of me to want to change that.
In practice, if my male colleague is better paid than me, I keep all my sorry for myself, and maybe sue the workplace using the tools we already have – and if I want the company to keep less of the money for profits and distribute more in wages, then I make an union, I guess. But saying that I am not allowed to feel shitty for the injustice of him living easier unless I have already, what, reformed capitalism? moved humanity into post-scarcity? is unfair.
what would be the disability equivalent? “Sure, yes, disabled people are paid peanuts for hard work, but before getting angry about that, think about how able people’s salaries are not rising fastly enough either! Treasure your cents and we will maybe give you the minimum wage after the glorious revolution!”
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Ginkgo said:
” But saying that I am not allowed to feel shitty for the injustice of him living easier unless I have already, what, reformed capitalism? moved humanity into post-scarcity? is unfair.”
It’s unfair and it’s a stupid deflection, and besides, it get the process exactly backwards. Changing the system starts with dissatisfaction, and that formulation is trying to forestall dissatisfaction, strangle it in its crib.
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Audrey said:
There is always something activists dealing with different groups can learn from each other, but I do not believe that feminism, which focuses on the situation of women, should have any great strength in advocating for or advising on the situation of men.
Male domestic violence shelters are a classic example of the assumption that an approach that has been applied to one group will work for another. In the UK (where I’m aware Ozy does not live, but UK MRAs have raised the same issue) DV shelters were set up by feminists and later received government funding when it no longer became acceptable to take homeless women’s children from them but refuges still enabled the government to police the outcomes for the children. Many women end up in refuges because it is considered abusive to expose a child to witnessing DV, and social services threaten to take the children away if the mother does not leave the home and go to a refuge. Thus the reason women’s refuges exist are historical and they are being replaced with other solutions.
The main reason that refuge places are not in place for men, in my experience in my former job, is because when asked, through either surveys or individually in interviews, this is not the solution the client group wants. Male DV clients generally do not want the policing, transience or stigma of entering a DV refuge. They generally want a long term tenancy within the community with visiting support.
There are no doubt individual clients who would like a refuge place, but this is housing services – underfunded everywhere. With a limited pot of money, the solution that suits the majority of clients will be chosen.
While I cannot comment on the specifics of the Canadian private DV shelter for men, I know Canada has also moved to tenancy plus support as a housing solution. And while it may not apply to that particular shelter, people do set up private homelessness services that are vastly inappropriate in approach and dangerous to clients, and as a consequence do not win competitive public funding bids. If that process didn’t happen, there would be plenty of men in the UK having their demons exorcised as a supposedly suitable solution to their problems in refuges which were then granted government funding.
There is good work being done in the different issues that particularly cause problems for men. What is lacking is a form of activism that takes that expertise and joins those issues up in a coherent way so that the ways that say, literacy and education, army recruitment, alcoholism and homelessness are connected to each other, and the cumulative nature of high levels of inequality and social exclusion are then the focus of that activism around men.
For whatever reason (and I am sure everyone can speculate about that reason) people with that expertise do not seem to be attracted to the MRA movement. But I don’t think there is any reason why feminists should be seen as the people who have that expertise.
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Ginkgo said:
“For whatever reason (and I am sure everyone can speculate about that reason) people with that expertise do not seem to be attracted to the MRA movement.”
The only exception I can think of is Erin Pizzey, the mother of the SDV shelter movement, who is an editor or something at AVfM. I don’t know if SAVE considers themselves MRM or not.
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Ginkgo said:
Aaaaghh
DV shelter…..
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qwertyne said:
” Male DV clients generally do not want the policing, transience or stigma” – and what, women love those? if they loved being policed in itself, they could just stay home. Of course these are unwanted side-effects. wtf. I am not a native speaker, so I asked google what it means that “They generally want a long term tenancy”. “tenancy, ˈtɛnənsi/, noun: possession of land or property as a tenant.” so they prefer to have their own flat? how strange, these men. I bet they prefer to have a whole, full-stocked kitchen compared to access to a soup kitchen, too. This proves that soup kitchens are unneded, even if we do not have the money for giving them flats with full fridges. ??? you seem to know a lot about this, so this should make more sense. maybe I am isunderstanding?
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qwertyne said:
ok, so let’s say tenancy means social housing. Women are not going to domestic violence shelters because if they had their own flats, they would have noone to gossip to… or noone to control them with rules the guys described as shitty. wtf still.
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Autolykos said:
Posts like this are why I love your blog. You are probably the first sane person I ever heared talking about gender issues (not counting the odd post on SSC), when everybody else is caught up in tribalism and “arguments are soldiers”. But that may just be because the intersection between the rationalist community and the social justice community is sadly very, very small.
Every single time I started reading up on it before, I encountered a solid wall of hate and bitterness, and couldn’t bring myself to read a single post to the end lest I lose my sanity before getting to the bottom (this goes for MRA as well as feminists). Now, I’m just reading through your blog and start to understand many things that never made sense to me before. Thank you for that.
I think I’ll just read this blog from front to back, so don’t be surprised about comments to long dead posts showing up in the near future.
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